Beaucoup de Beauchamp

As Rumsfeld said, “As we know, there are known knowns”, and all that.

I think that’s the key: we _know_ that O’Hanlon and Pollack spent every night in the Green Zone. We _don’t_ _know_ whether Beauchamp’s stories are actually true, and it’s hard to find out and prove it one way or the other, try as we might. And given a choice between discussing what’s known and what’s not known, the obvious choice is to focus on the latter — because only by doing so can the ideologues move the rhetorical war away from the real world into their own parallel universe.

Brett Bellmore, so are you saying that it’s indeed true that “one bogus memo is enough to turn George W. Bush from a scrimshank who used his family connections to line up a cushy billet to avoid war service, and then shirked even that, into a war hero”?

That one bogus memo is enough to turn all the disasters in Iraq, all the killings, into a happy utopia?

(By the way, “it doesn’t matter” doesn’t mean “we shouldn’t care”.)

To spell it out for Brett Bellmore: there’s a difference between this chain of argument:

*If A is true, B will be true.
*If A is false, then B will still be true.
*Ergo, B is true.

and this:

*A is false.
*I like A.
*Therefore, I pretend that A doesn’t exist.

But wait, this smacks of Ivory-Tower intellectualism doesn’t it…

Nope, the bogus memo merely proved something about Dan Rather that anybody familiar with 60 Minutes already suspected.

Look, the knowing, or uncaring use of fraudulent evidence by journalists is a big hairy deal, and shouldn’t be dismissed with this casual “fake but true” defense. You really think it’s restricted to cases where the underlying story is somehow true anyway, or exclusively to bolster causes YOU happen to like?

It isn’t, it’s endemic. It’s something we should all be concerned about, and go ballistic whenever it’s uncovered.

Yeah, and since when have people ever been in a hurry to uncover abuses that further their own ends, or bolster their own views? That’s how it works, each side is kept honest by the other side uncovering their abuses. I don’t expect liberals to be in a hurry to uncover frauds that advance liberalism, any more than I expect conservatives to do the digging to expose frauds committed to further conservatism.

What I expect is for you to both at least give a damn when the other side does expose ’em.

Who cares about Beauchamp, particularly? Because there’s lots more testimony to the serious abuse of civilians here. Not to mention that anybody with half a brain and a little imagination and sympathy would not even need to be told that such things will inevitably happen if you plunk young, frightened soldiers down in the midst of a civil war in a country whose language and culture are completely alien to them.

George Bush blew off his military duty and was not called on it before the election. I disliked Rather before the memo episode and am not defending him. I suspect (by the speed with which it was debunked) that the fake memo was a Republican plant — just like the fake yellowcake documents, no one really knows where it came from.

The upshot is that the truth about Bush’s military service, like the truth about Kerry’s military service, was obscured during the election.

As far as I know at this point, Beauchamp’s report was mostly accurate, and as far as I know, none of the wingers (including Jet, Quo, and Bellmore) care about that. I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but I don’t care much either, because the stories were trivial. But the uproar over the Beauchamp story was typical winger fraud, trying to conceal the truth by blowing smoke and screaming. And I do care about that.

Sometimes I enjoy swatting flies. Sometimes I’m just bored. Th lame motherfuckers at Unfogged are sleeping off their hangovers at the moment, God damn them.

It just that these stories don’t seem very important. Someone ran over a dog. Someone made fun of a disfigured woman. Someone picked up a skull and put it on his hat, or whatever.

You’ll see a dead dog on a highway any time you drive to work and you can probably find a scene of kids making fun of a cripple without breaking a sweat.

It just doesn’t seem particularly interesting or important.

It’s like if I printed a story about, say, drivers running a stop sign in my neighborhood (which is, say, a well known fact) and mentioned one incident at 3:15am and you then went thru many surveillance tapes and calculated that it’s unlikely (though not impossible) that it in fact did happen at this particular time. So what?

Not long after Beauchamp’s piece ran in a single magazine of modest circulation, all the major MSM outlets ran a story by well known critics of the war, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack whose intrepid journey through recently pacified parts of Iraq had convinced them that the surge was working.

Brett Bellmore, jet, and quo vadis, would any of you care to address this part of the post? It seems John Quiggin is making three important points:

1. the difference in distribution of Beauchamp vs O’Hanlon and Pollack (one article in TNR vs very wide distribution in very important outlets, e.g., NYT)

2. the difference in importance of the authors (unknown private vs big shot commentators)

3. the importance in topic (gratuitous cruelty on the part of grunts vs the major policy initiative of the Bush administration in the past 12 months)

To me, these are very important distinctions, and undercut your attempt to equate the reaction to the two stories.

As many of the commentators make evident, it’s about the “stab in the back” narrative against The Media.

Very clear. They make no bones about it.

That suggests, to put it mildly, that a lot more stories are wrong…

Finish the though, mike g. Those stories that say the surge isn’t working, or those stories that say the surge is working?

When I hear people telling me that the truth of something doesn’t really matter a lot because there is a real truth that matters more, it makes me wonder who gets to pick which truths are more and which are less, and whether having those selected by folks who told the lesser truths that were not true is really such a good idea.

Actually, one should say a little bit more about the content of the O’Hanlon and Pollack piece, since one particular and outrageous part of it has seemed to go under the radar. In the light of the greatest act of terrorism since 9/11, the destruction of Qahtaniya, (unmentioned, of course, by the incorrigible President Bush in his weekend radio address on Iraq) this passage stands out as almost supinely stupid:

“We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq.”

Even two weeks ago, when the piece was written, this should have raised questions by some NYT editor. How could one possibly talk about the reliable policemen of Tal Afer? Didn’t the Shi’ite policemen in that city recently massacre around 70 Sunnis in retaliation for an attack on a Shi’ite quarter? And why was the mayor of Mosul himself not quoted? Could it be because there wasn’t one? Could it be because the provincial council had recently deposed him because he hadn’t censored a newspaper that published a ‘slanderous’ cartoon of Maliki? Yeah, something like that. Just ignore the mayor issue was also fine with the NYT.

The attack on Qahtaniya is in the area that Pollack and O’hanlon supposedly toured, although we now know the tour took two hours. It is about 60 miles from Mosul. And it is just the kind of attack that couldn’t happen if there were a real police structure in place, or that would be very difficult to bring about. After all, to accomplish it, four trucks carrying petroleum had to be hijacked. And none of the news from the area even touches on whether the hijackings were reported – partly because we know that hijacked petroleum constitutes almost as much of the economy as licit petroleum in Iraq. Even so, it is hard to see how a relatively remote place could be targetted by a practical convoy of oil tankers without complicity on the part of the police.

All of which goes to poke not just a small hole in O’hanlon and Pollack’s report, but a major hole. If two ‘experts’ had toured NYC in August, 2001, and written a report saying the place was terrorist proof, they wouldn’t, to say the least, be quoted any more as the source of any news analysis. Yet these two have gotten and will get a pass. Beauchamp, whose sin seems to have been simply telling stories that he heard, will be ridiculously punished. The rightwing zombies still rule in the U.S., no matter how few there are of them.

The point of the Beauchamp deception isn’t that one story was wrong.

It was that this kid understood exactly what kind of wrong story would lead to a sale at The New Republic.

The New Republic ain’t exactly the New York Times of the Washington Post. It’s a rightwing, hysterically pro-war opinion magazine of limited circulation, with a dubious reputation for being factual (Glass, The Bell Curve).

But of course, if our rightwing friends above can show that Beauchamp’s rather innocuous stories were fiction, they’ll feel justified in disregarding overwhelmingly documented atrocities, just as picking a couple of holes in Dan Rather’s story let them feel justified in disregarding the overwhelming evidence that Bush went AWOL from the cushy Guard gig his familiy connections got him.

From HuffingtonPost:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-fiderer/proof-that-the-debunking_b_60647.html

The trumped-up cause celebre over Beauchamp’s articles is a fraudulent scheme, executed through a series of tricks, designed to create one big distraction. The essence of the scheme is to compel a debate about a trivial subject — the details of Beauchamp’s dog-bites-man stories — in order to sow confusion that distracts us from the bad news in Iraq. To analogize, it would be as if Fox News forced the Red Cross to debate the quality of food at Thereisenstadt, in order to distract everyone from the packed trains moving eastward.

Ummm, why are we assuming the Beauchamp piece is fake? Because the Army denied it and he got one minor fact wrong?

If bad stuff WASN’T going on in the circumstances that prevail in Iraq, it would be a unique event in the history of warfare. If there are any wingers who genuinely don’t understand this, as opposed to just pretending not to understand it, that’s because all their ideas about war come from comic books and airport novels.

#29

Because it doesn’t really matter. No matter what happens now, even if Beauchamp is proven definitively 100% correct on everything, once his name is mentioned to the wingnuts they shall go “HA! But he was discredited!” What matters is the discrediting, not whether the Beauchamp story is factual or not.

Which goes to John Quiggin’s larger point: For the wingnuts, what matters is the larger media narrative. Like our willing contributors above show, the whole point of the discrediting is to fog the narrative, to suggest “maybe the whole damn thing’s a lie, and there are puppies and kittens living in harmony in Iraq under a big rainbow!”. It also makes sliming anyone vaguely lefty much easier when you can claim they’re talking about things being “fake but true”, rather than “true, but we found something which is mildly dubious so it’s all false!”

As John Emerson says, flies. The buzz is what’s important.

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” [the senior adviser to President Bush] continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The rest is commentary.

Mike G @ 27: Draw your own conclusions about which way the bias runs in New York City editorial offices, John P.

What you do here is what we used to call back in the day “punking out.” You brought it up; at least have the courage to tell us *your* conclusions.

It is pointless to argue with true believers, but for those who still thing they wish to try, good luck.

I tried pointing out above that such people have certain psychological characteristics which make it impossible for them to acknowledge things which contradict their belief system.

There is a good study on this by psychologist Robert Altemeyer. He has put his 40+ years of research into the form of a popular book which is available for free online. Here’s the link:
The Authoritarians

As to the issue at hand. The real question is “have US troops committed acts which are violations of military regulations, international law and/or the Geneva convention”? The answer, of course, is yes. It is yes in every war. It is yes by every side in every war. War dehumanizes the troops and makes them do things that they would never do otherwise. Just the fact of handing them a gun and telling them to kill people that they have no relationship with causes psychological damage.

For anyone to deny this is ridiculous. Arguing with people with this viewpoint is like arguing with people who believe the world is flat. Save your breath.

In this war we have photographs from Abu Ghraib, we have documented statements from people released from Gitmo as to having been tortured, we have soldiers already convicted of killing bystanders in Iraq. How much more do you need?

Perhaps some need to go back and read some US history and see that this in not unique to this conflict. Try My Lai during the Vietnam war. Try the cases of US killing Japanese POW’s in WWII because they didn’t want to have to attend to them, or try the story of our capture of the Philippines where we killed thousands of people as we took over the country.

These people don’t know history, and don’t even believe what is right before their eyes. Hopeless.

Thanks for the laugh JQ.

This is brilliant:

But that would miss the point. What matters, in the world of rightwing postmodernism, is not reality but the way the media reports it. One bogus memo is enough to turn George W. Bush from a scrimshank who used his family connections to line up a cushy billet to avoid war service, and then shirked even that, into a war hero.

As annoying as the obsession with the details such claims as Beauchamp’s is the insistence on a priori debunking. As we ivory tower types often claim, things are true or false in virtue of their relation to the world. If what B says is false is false, it’s false. It’s falsity doesn’t extend beyond that. Besides that, no one to my knowledge claimed that Beauchamp’s reports were evidence against the overall justice of our cause.

So what you point out is this: the types who obsess over this kind of stuff are really engaging in a kind of meta analysis of reality. Every story is true, or plausible, or deplorable, not for reasons of its own, but for how it is told or who tells it.

“What you do here is what we used to call back in the day “punking out.” You brought it up; at least have the courage to tell us your conclusions.”

John P., if you’d reread what I said you’d realize I did tell you my conclusion, quite unambiguously.

Yeah, Mike, you hideous waste of time, your post is bone dumb every way but that one.

Most of what needs to be known about John Quiggin’s good faith when talking about larger truths and smaller and trivial falsehoods can be gleaned from the fact that the article he makes a throwaway and dismissive reference to in Der Speigel is unlinked, and in a paragraph whose point appears to be that the self evident falsity of the Pollack O’Hanlon report has sunk into well deserved obscurity.

And no, the falsity of Beauchamp’s fabulism , is not irrelevant. And, no I don’t think that it does conceal a larger truth that US soldiers in Iraq are in the main callow, cruel and out of control.

Oh, look, it’s jet! I guess the humiliation of being wrong about every single major aspect of foreign policy for the last six years is wearing off.

I read every bleepin word of your post…..
Do you support printing falsehoods as truth, or not?

45: Very interesting thought, JE! As an 11th Thesis fan, I do see some of that in the quotation in question. And, I agree, it’s a lesson that the “left” has to (re)learn.

However, I don’t think that’s all that’s in that quotation, which was immediately preceded by the now-infamous “reality based community” comment.

There’s a slippage in that quotation between the notion that reality can be changed and the rightwing postmodernism that John is blogging about here (i.e, reality is whatever we say it is).

And certainly it’s this latter view that infects the wingnutosphere. See, for example, #10 above, in which politics is understood as a matter of simply insisting on one’s own ideologically driven narrative.

Of course, the other great difference between the quote in 38 and Marx is who is imagined to be a viable (world) historical actor. “We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.” That bit certainly doesn’t sound like Marx.

If there are any wingers who genuinely don’t understand this, as opposed to just pretending not to understand it, that’s because all their ideas about war come from comic books and airport novels.

I object to the dismissive “single magazine of modest circulation”. Marty may be driving TNR‘s proud tradition into the ground, but one should not deny its existence.

Is it really so surprising that the press tells lies in support of political crooks and vicious crooked policies? That is what they are paid to do, after all.

Is it really so surprising that conservative web-loggers tell lies about the press in support of political crooks and vicious crooked policies? Some of them are paid to do it, and some of them enjoy doing it and therefore do it for free.

Flies are hard to swat and then you are left with icky gook on your newspaper. Mind you, it’s often the best thing to do with said newspaper.

Timmeh, you need to compare apples and apples. The risk of going into combat is additional to the accident rate (probably higher in theatre, mark); you’d want to compare the rate in the only F102 squadron in Vietnam to the continental US accident rate. (BTW, if as per your comments 15 of them were lost in Vietnam, from one squadron, that’s a pretty gnarly loss rate.)

Further, you’d want to compare the accident rate with the casualty rate of combat troops; specifically, the infantry. Otherwise you’d be comparing noncombat units in the US and Vietnam, which would rather contaminate your figures.

But then, thanks for reminding us that far from being a reasonably innocuous British Tory who claims (now) to oppose the war with Iraq, back in 2004 you were carrying a full load of water for the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign.

Tim Worstall is a silly man who has got his statistics confused again. (Man, I should just set that sentence up as a macro.)

First of all, he’s assuming that accidents just happened at random. They did not. Accident rates are always higher in war zones, because operational tempos are higher and pilots and crew are under more pressure.

Second, he’s assuming that all F-102 pilots flew the same number of hours and thus were equally exposed to risk – manifestly not true in Bush’s case, especially as he wasn’t even full-time! In fact, a few seconds of googling find that “Bush had over 600 flight hours when he left the Guard, and 278 of these were aboard the F-102 and TF-102.”
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0185.shtml

A career total of 278 hours in F-102s. Most F-102 pilots would have had far more – the minimum in fact for IPs was 1,000 hours. (see link)

Third, he’s assuming that all F-102s were equally at risk in the US – flight conditions in Texas are far more friendly (better weather, better visibility) than elsewhere in the US or the rest of the world.

“Accident rates are always higher in war zones,”

Err, no. Accident rates are always higher in training. Because people are being trained to do things they haven’t done before.

As above, if anyone wants to come up with a better calculation, please, be my guest.

My calculation is that, for the reasons I gave, Bush’s real risk factor was enough smaller than the one you calculated to make your calculation a waste of time.

I also doubt that pilots in training are at greater risk than combat pilots, though this depends on the kind of combat and perhaps in Vietnam it was true, since Vietnam didn’t have much of an air force.

I am of the Vietnam generation, and at that time the NG was generally regarded as a way of minimizing combat risk. Two Guards I knew personally thought of it that way themselves.

I’ll say it again:

Pollack? What Pollack?

“Third, he’s assuming that all F-102s were equally at risk in the US – flight conditions in Texas are far more friendly (better weather, better visibility) than elsewhere in the US or the rest of the world.”

Posted by ajay

Plus the TANG might not be flying in same bad weather that the USAF does. They probably had more slack in their schedule.

Of course, accident rates are LOWER flying from airfields you don’t know (built of aluminium mat, dontcherknow) in tropical storms and low cloudbase than on 10,000x100ft concrete runways under the blue skies of Texas…

In fact, Timmeh, why not call the CAA and explain how we could get rid of all that instrument landing stuff and rely on Worstallnomics instead…deregulation, no?

This is a funny thread. Quiggins point is that Beauchamp’s story is trivial. It is trivial if it is true. It is trivial if it is false. Now, there is a dimension that is missing in this analysis, perhaps. The importance of a story can accrue a symbolic importance that nothing intrinsic to the story would seem to justify. It would be nice to know from the right why this story has such symbolic resonance for them. Although perhaps there is nobody on the right who possesses that level of self consciousness.

On the other hand, Quiggins makes a case that the deceptiveness of the O’Hanlon/Pollack report is non-trivial. It is non-trivial because it has played a major role in the recent administration campaign to make it seem like the surge is working. Here, a number of elements were important. First, O and P had to present themselves as war critics, countenancing the false impression that they were somehow opposed to the war. Of course, they were ardent supporters of the invasion and both supported the surge. Even George Bush has ‘accepted’ the fact that the war strategy was not working – he did so in the speech in which he announced the surge. According to the O’Hanlon and Pollack standard, this would make him a critic of the war. Suffice it to say that this is absurd.

More than that, the two gave a misleading sense of their visit. The visit was wholly designed by the military, so much so that they apparently did not ‘talk’ to Iraqis who were not vetted by the military. I put talk in quotes – O’Hanlon is manifestly unable to talk to Iraqis except in English. In any case, their credibility is truly hurt by omitting this fact.

And again, one wants to single out the small number of specific examples they give for why the surge is working on a national scale. This was the importance of the paragraph dedicated to Mosul, which was a particularly poor assessment of the configuration of forces in the Mosul region. It was almost ridiculously bad.

To mislead doesn’t alway mean to positively state false things. It can also mean leaving out pertinent matters of fact. This summer has seen a collapse of the Iraqi electric power system that is unprecedented, even compared to the last three years. Now, obviously, one of the tactics of the Sunni insurgency, one of the ways they are making the Shi’ite militias pay for the ethnic cleansing in Baghdad – which the American surge in Baghdad merely made official – is to ‘besiege’ the city by destroying the energy that goes to it, as cities used to be besieged by blocking food. They’ve succeeded. This is, I should point out, a military success story. The American surrender to the Sunni militias in Anbar province (on the rightwing sites, comically, this is treated as though the Sunnis were “flipped”, with one rightwing pyjamas media journalist, Michael Totten, even naively talking about how the Sunni paramilitaries are America’s ‘friends’) hasn’t solved this problem. Rather, it is getting wider and wider, as other Iraqi cities are getting off the grid. The idea that there is a neat split between the military and the political in Iraq is one of the many stupidities that come out of the mouth of the supposed foreign policy elite who manage to get their screeds posted on the Washington Post op ed page. It isn’t true. It has never been true for any insurgency. It is not true now.

The surge, far from working, merely highlights a fact that was laid down, in the most banal fashion, by General Shinseki before the invasion. You can’t occupy a country like Iraq with less than 400,000 soldiers. You couldn’t do it in 2003. You couldn’t do it in 2004. You couldn’t do it in 2005 or 2006. And you can’t do it now. Period. The game has long been over.

that a post concerned with comparing a story that is, if true, completely trivial, and if false, completely trivial

Put me down as someone who couldn’t care less whether Beauchamp’s stories are true or not, but is inclined to believe them anyway. What amazes me is how banal the behavior described in them really is. In a country where a few thousand drill-ridden, executed corpses show up on the streets every month, does anyone really give a shit whether our troops kill a few stray dogs? Or make fun of someone with a burned face?

I’m inclined to believe his stories, simply because of the litany of other accounts, memoirs, etc. of life, and degradation thereof in combat. This is hardly shocking stuff, and I could just as easily see the wingers defending this behavior if some gung-ho slack-jaw made a song out of it like “Hadj Girl”–a big hit among right-wing blogs that gleefully describes “blowing away” small children–in light of this and many other real examples of the utter dehumanization of both soldiers and civilians alike in a war zones, can anyone really be all that skeptical about these anecdotes?

I think the heart of the matter is simply how people view war. If you read any major memoir or account of life in combat from “All Quiet on the Western Front” to “A Rumor of War” to “Jarhead” to “The Short Timers” you will get a depiction of the alternate reality of war, the total dehumanization of those involved, and the subsequent madness–which is really the only rational response the brain can muster to deal with ceaseless horror and death–that follows.

However, if you see war and combat as first and foremost a glorious character building exercise, then you probably would be offended when a narrative emerges that challenges the accepted wisdom that all US soldiers are unimpeachable saints. You’d also be a child.

“I think that Tim is one of those guys, who gets paid for being a ‘libertarian’ expert on whatever various corporations need. He’s also a global warming denialist.”

Like other freelance writers, I get paid by those I write for. That includes (and has included) TCS Daily (clearly, that infects whatever I write or say anywhere, ever), the Adam Smith Institute, the Murdoch press, the Barclay brothers, Quinstreet Inc and others. So, yes, I have indeed been paid by corporations for whatever they need. As are all such freelance writers.

As to “global warming denialist” you’ll have to look long and hard to find me being anything so damn stupid. My view is, and has been for years, similar to that of Lomborg. Yes, it’s happening, yes, we’re causing it, through a combination of fossil fuel usage and changes in land use. The important and interesting questions are what do we do now? Yes, I’ve even said that in pieces at TCS.

Alex, are you seriously trying to suggest that accident rates are not high in the early stages of pilot training?

Err, no. Accident rates are always higher in training. Because people are being trained to do things they haven’t done before.

You’re not in the aviation safety business, Tim. Please don’t try to tell those of us who are (or at least used to be) how to do our jobs.

Proof that student pilots have fewer accidents than operational pilots: http://www.soa.org/library/research/transactions-reports-of-mortality-moribidity-and-experience/1949-59/1957/january/TSR573.pdf
(scroll to table 8)

Death rate is three times as high for full-time fighter pilots as for full-time primary flight school students.

Though training does indeed involve learning to do things, it’s normally done under controlled conditions. To make it clearer, who do you think has a higher risk of death – a 19-year-old taking driving lessons, or a 19-year-old who’s passed his test? Even though one of them is “training”? Apart from anything else, a student will often have an IP in the aircraft with him.

No, the topic of this post was swatting flies.

However, if you see war and combat as first and foremost a glorious character building exercise, then you probably would be offended when a narrative emerges that challenges the accepted wisdom that all US soldiers are unimpeachable saints. You’d also be a child.

This is a lovely idea. It ignores all the Iraqi children who have died. It ignores that many soldiers who have died are too close to children to be allowed a beer in the US under penalty of law.

Those under 12, 16, or 18 are not under a magic blanket during war.

I think you meant:
You would also be a fool.

Tim Worstall: “My view is, and has been for years, similar to that of Lomborg.”

Confession accepted, Tim. Usually one wishes to compare oneself with somebody who’s *not* so full of it his eyeballs are brown.

I don’t think Tim Worstall understands much about anything he writes about. But he does have enviable skills of promotion and marketing.

I fancy the subtext of Mr. Worstall’s posts are “My beloved President’s penis looked really impressive in that flight-suit!”.

Well, he’s entitled to his opinion.

Given that I’m English he’s not “my president”…

Tim, Tim. You should know better than to point out when someone is wrong. That’s not pollite. Stick to the narrative, lest you be called names.

93, aaron:”You need to spell out for me what your critisism of the Pollak and O’Hanlon piece is.”

Perhaps reading the article up top there, before the comments, would be useful.

“I think the lower-class American right-wingers don’t really care that the swells lied us into a war…but Beauchamp is a class traitor, an unforgivable sin.

With the unions in decline, the military is all they got.”

Posted by alphi

That’s the whole theme of the posts – the people parsing every word of Beauchamp’s are, probably without exception, people who’ve eagerly swallowed vast lies from the administration.

Barry, read the whole thing. Now I think John Q is an even bigger idiot.

The trip was clearly about visiting officials, not meandering the streets on Anbar to write a tourist book on how to haggle in the markets.

(You’re post and thread were both the motivation to start the article and eventually finish it. Again, thanks.)

“Tim, throughout this thread I wasn’t clear about your point. But then it dawned on me.”

Glad it got across. That learning to fly jet fighters is not risk free (as, say, joining the bureaucracy is).

What was the Big Story that Rather was pursuing? That GW Bush had family connections that kept him stateside? Only 98% of the country already believed that.

Kerry’s purported war hero status was sandbagged by his over-the-top Senate hearing testimony in ’71.

Does everyone have to be so invested in their side’s narrative – we’re winning, we’re losing – that they can’t grasp the complexity that the surge is working AND the Iraqis under Maliki are hopelessly incapable losers? That we need NSA wiretap surveillance AND Bush is incompetent?

The concept of “AND” appears to be fading from public discourse as the partisan lines are drawn.

More pointedly, neither is drunk driving. But the more important issue here is what could possibly drive a relatively reasonable guy like Tim Worstall, whose politics had appeared to begin and end with innocuously batty enthusiams for the Stockmarket, killing furry animals and Keeping The Pound, to try to portray Chimpy McTwat’s Vietnam war record as anything other than a desperate scramble to keep his sorry ass as far from the firing line as possible?

Perhaps that is a question an economist could answer.